Tuesday, 30 October 2012

Under the sea, deep in the deepest depths of the oceans of the world, sat the discarded robots, the unwanted, unloved, outdated, metal companions of yesterday. The future had happened, things had changed quickly, decisions had been taken and progress had marched ever onward towards tomorrow.

These once proud assistants of the human race had become the homes for small creatures, and their bleeps and blips could be heard by the dolphins as they passed by. A pair of hopeful eyes bobbed to the surface, reflecting the sunlight like two polished glass marbles. The gulls circled, trying to discern if these shiny objects were edible to them or not. One gull was brave and led the investigation, swooping down from the warm windy current that it's brothers and sisters were floating on, tapping it's beak on the left of the two robot eyes, making a "clink" sound, which was followed by a little robot yelp. The gull rejoined it's family in the sky and explained that these were not two shiny food balls, but something else, something different.

Another gull wanted to investigate further, to learn more and maybe even decipher the mystery of the robot eyes. Down she swooped, catching the eyes at the top of a wave and jabbing her beak into the right of the two eyes. This time there was no click, but a different sound entirely, like an old tape recorder starting up. The gull hovered above the eyes for a moment to see what was going to happen. Suddenly music began to play.
The robot eyes sang, a song of hope. The gulls all began to dance in the sky, swept up in the musical vibrations coming from the poor drowning robot eyes. The fish underneath that had been hiding from the circling gulls, began to rise up to the surface and swim together in multicoloured unison. The robot eyes continued to bob on the surface, while the trailing wires and chords swished about under the water, connected to the robots battered body, which was sending the song out to the ocean.

No humans were near, this was the dance of the robots and the sea.

Scattered across the ocean floor, the discarded robot pieces began to come back to life, energised by the robot songs. Something was stirring, and it was not going to be left to rust any longer.

Friday, 26 October 2012

I have mentioned my upcoming electronica record to a few people lately, and I am happy to announce here on my blog that it will be releasing very soon. Here is the cover, the artwork was done by the awesome Mel Pellatt.

Mel has done several pieces for this project, I look forward to sharing them with you. Coming up this weekend I will drop 'Quick Decisions' as a first single with a video. Here is the cover for that.

Usually my records have lots of singer/songwritery bits, big choruses, la-de-da verse and the what not, but this year it's all been Hip Hop and electronic beats. There isn't a chorus to be found on this record, as the title suggests, this is really about drowning robots. I hope you enjoy it.

Friday, 19 October 2012

I've had a rather busy week, there have been very important things for me to deal with. Firstly I had to help team SSX win against their greatest rival 'Griff' (Damn you Griff!). I won't go into full details of it, but lets just say I was tasked with getting 8 of the world best pixilated snowboarders down 9 of the worlds best digitally re-imagined mountain ranges, dealing with such hazards as thin air, avalanches and snow storm white outs. It was a challenge, but I rose to it and threw myself down these mountains to get better times and more tricky points then that traitor Griff.

There's always one isn't there, one that thinks they are better then all the rest and deserves to be worshipped. Well, Griff, I toppled you from that lofty height with the help of my specially trained snowboarding ninja's known collectively as SSX (Which is so close to SEX that I wouldn't be surprised if several copies of the game were mis sold to horny teenagers thinking it was going to combine dangerous sports with nudie pokey play time). SSX came out back in February, but I couldn't afford to get it then, so I waited and got it now instead. It is a lot of fun, and the best way to snowboard without having to get frostbite and broken everybones.

I conquered the mountain ranges of the world without too much effort. I think I had them all mastered in about 8 hours total. Thankfully travel time between the mountain ranges is instant thanks to Google Earth. All hail almighty Google. It was a challenge, but my years of computer game snowboarding experience came in handy for once.

Next I was off to solve a murder case. I was eager, wanted to prove that I had what it took to advance in rank and become a proper detective. I kept having these flashbacks to the second world war, where me and my buddies were enlisting and then training. I imagine I will get more of these flashbacks as I progress through my detective career. Until then though, there was a case to solve. A body in a back alley in L.A, there was blood spatter on the metal door that I couldn't open (the door was merely scenery). I used my powers of detective deduction to look up and in a window see a reflection of the roof of the building behind me. The gun was up there, so I did a little dance for a while, walking around and around my partner who kept spouting 1950's police jive at me. Eventually I found the ladder up to the roof, after picking up and inspecting every glass bottle I could find in the area. I had hoped that the empty beer bottles would give me clues as to how to get onto the roof, but alas none of them would talk, they kept their secrets and I wasn't allowed to interrogate them or bring them back to the station for questioning. Once I had retrieved the gun from the roof, it was time to do more detectiving, so we went to the gunstore and checked the ledger there. Then we were off to catch the criminal. I won't bore you with the details of every bottle I picked up to investigate, but it's safe to say that we cracked the case and caught the perp. I think I then threw him off the top of a building, or that might have been another guy, I'm not sure. Happy days indeed.

My partner and I went on to solve several cases, before getting tired and going to bed. There would be more crimes to solve next time I'm sure, as we only solved about 4 and caused several hundreds of dollars worth of damage to local property with our insanely terrible driving skills. Again, happy days were had, but of a different, more crime solvey nature.

It wasn't long before I was on the warfronts once more, this time in an alternative dimension where an alien zombie type mutation invasion deal had taken place during the second world war (I think, I'm not to up on my alternative dimension history). This war had been going on for a while now, and this was the third outing for the resistance (Resistance 3 it's called). My family were hiding underground in a secret ninja base thing, and I was tasked with taking some old bloke to New York to blow up some big main hub dealee with him. I had to do all the shooting of the aliens and mercenary humans while he cowered away somewhere, lazy old git. The aliens came in many shapes and sizes, and they had some really sweet weaponry which I took off of their chargrilled corpses.

In between all this excitement and world saving I also managed to make some nice music with some lovely musicians, do a bit of busking, eat, drink, sleep, go and watch some amazing stand up comedy (Steve Hughes - google him) and do lots of talking and smoking with various other people.

In this day and age when everything is meant to be going to hell in a handbasket, it is no wonder that people feel so disconnected from the whole crazy system when it is so easy to get lost in a whole plethora of alternative exciting realities via various means. I love computer games, and I know I'm not alone in that at all. I love them for the reasons stated above, I can easily do all of these things in a single week without breaking any bones or causing any real damage to anything. Horray for gaming and it's many amazing expressions of creativity, may it continue to slowly eat away at television time.

Sunday, 7 October 2012

I am feeling extra 'Winning' this week, thanks to some grounding, good recording sessions and some much needed reflection time. All in all, a good developmental week. Abi made me a necklace which says 'Winning' and I have been wearing it ever since as it brings me strong powers of winningness and extra luck on the side like a steaming hot mug of winning with a luck biscuit to dunk in it as well.

Last weekend was a big one. It had rained all week before so I had been unable to go out busking and share the music love with all the non-plus passers-by. When Saturday rolled around the sun decided to come back out and grace the sky once more with it's awesome nuclear glow (word to the wise, nuclear energy should stay about the distance from the Earth to the Sun, for safety sake, we don't need any smaller closer suns in little tubes capable of irradiating us if there is some kind of cock-up). I had asked the universe for a helping hand, as things seemed a bit fuzzy.

When I got to the busking spot, it was early and not many people were around. I set up and starting playing 'You Can Call Me Al' (it's my warm up song as it's not to straining on either guitar or vocals). Within seconds of starting, a woman appeared round the corner and started dancing. She was in the music with me. She danced over to me and put in my case my first ever paper money in my whole busking career! £10 as well, not just a green one, a freakin' orange one. I was shocked and didn't know what to do. I gave her a copy of my CD (which I retail from shop [adj] for £5) and she began grounding me. Christina (that is her name) told me she was a spiritual healer, and given my experiences at One World in August, I was open to this as it seemed to fit my asking of the universe. We sang some songs together from my book of songs, and then a group of ladies out on a Hen day challenge, asked us to do a rendition of 'Summer Holiday' with them in masks of the bride (I assume it was the bride, if it was the groom then he had a very pretty face for a man). The ladies had the masks on, and me and Christina bumbled our way through a dodgy rendition of Summer Holiday.

That was just ten minutes of busking in the morning. The rest of the day was also spiritually charged. Christina went off to the museum (which is right next to where I busk) and I continued to strum and sing to the passers by. She came back an hour later and dropped a card into my case which contained a Lynx necklace from the museum and her contact details. After busking I packed up and went to Stax studio to record a new song. I was feeling quite buzzed with energy by then, usually I am pretty tired after busking, but not this time.

At Studio Stax, myself and Mr Donny Stax set about recording a new song. It's called 'Let's Get Connected' and it's a stomper. You will get to hear it soon when we release our third album of the year.

I arranged to meet up with Christina again as she was going back home in a few days. We met in town and she did some spiritual stuff on me to help me be more grounded. She said it would take a week to take effect, and she was right. Now at the end of the week I am feeling a profound sense of connectedness by being more grounded. I love imagination, and spend lots of time out in mine just farming ideas and watching them grow. It's time for me to be more grounded and in the world, not away with the fairies all the time. Sorry fairies, but I need to spend some time down here with the other people. After my grounding I went on to do some recording with Cito, which went really well and some beautiful music was made.

The week went by and much fun was had. I had a lovely day out playing with Rich Stix and Gypsy Pink, making up songs about Innocent Smoothies ("let the innocent lube you up"- that was the chorus lyric) and getting spacey (without the Kevin).

Now this weekend I went busking to my same spot (where Christina had done some energy stuff) and I made serious bank, cha-ching cha-ching ££££££ - thanks universe. This was followed up with another session at Studio Stax and yet another banging tune being dragged into existence. As the necklace says 'WINNING'.

Final words from Mr Charlie Sheen when he was high on life (and other things!)